AP: Why are Europeans provoking Muslims????

The way this piece starts off irritates as being just an apology piece on why those nasty Euros are picking on Muslims instead of being a serious article on why Muslim immigrants and some parts of Europe are surrending to hardline Muslim beliefs.

With the West locked in conflicts across the Muslim world, why would anyone throw fuel on the fire?

A small group of Europeans have been doing just that — provoking death plots and at least one murder by turning out art that derides the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran in the name of Western values.

Behind the scenes is something bigger: a rising European unease with a rapidly growing Muslim minority, and the spreading sense that the continent has become a front in a clash of civilizations.

Recent events — including surprising electoral success by an anti-Islamic Dutch party, moves to ban veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, and arrests in Ireland and the U.S. this week in an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist — are signs of the rising tensions.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks says he was defending freedom of speech when he produced a crude black-and-white drawing of Muhammad with a dog's body in 2007. Authorities say that set him in the crosshairs of an assassination plot by extremists including Colleen LaRose, a 46-year-old Muslim convert from Pennsylvania who dubbed herself "Jihad Jane."

Vilks said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that he wasn't interested in offending Muslims as an end in itself, but wanted to show that he could make provocative art about any topic he chose. "There is nothing so holy you can't offend it," he said.

BBC boss praises herself hiring young black woman.

Just to underscore the political correctness at BBC.

BBC1 controller Jay Hunt has defended axing Arlene Phillips from Strictly Come Dancing by saying it enabled a 'young, black, woman presenter' to replace her.

The 43-year-old appeared to suggest the decision last year to axe Miss Phillips, which sparked scores of complaints about ageism and sexism, was offset by bringing in a presenter from an ethnic minority: Alesha Dixon.

But her claims will do little to little to quell criticism that the former Hot Gossip choreographer, 66, was forced to make way for 31-year-old Miss Dixon because of her age and has now sparked new claims of political correctness.

Here is the quote.

Hunt explains that she also needs to develop a new group of presenters with credibility and expertise who, in five years' time, can front big factual series on BBC1, and who are successors to David Dimbleby, David Attenborough, etc. "We still want older women on BBC1 in every guise. Alongside that we want authoritative figures for the future."

The news presenters Fiona Bruce and Sophie Raworth, for instance. Hunt adds: "Yes, a lot of people were upset about Arlene but the flip side is, in Alesha, we have a young, black, woman presenter, at the heart of the Saturday night BBC1 schedule. Anyway, Arlene is part of the latest returning hit, So You Think You Can Dance?."

So congrats to Alesha, you got hired for being black! Diversity without merit is garbage.

Obama’s womanly attitude to leadership praised.

If Obama attitude to leadership is a womanly one and he acted like Thatcher I wouldn't have a problem with most of his agenda. But in this case it means acquiescing to other people's demand.

Chaudhury: The criticism of the Obama administration seems to be particularly “male,” you know? When you say ‘why aren’t you fighting back, why aren’t you policing?’ I think we’ve been talking about having women in leadership positions, and Obama’s attitude to leadership is really a very womanly one, you know, which is consensual, which is thought through, which calms the temperature down of the world, and it’s very important to remember that, you know.

Jarrett: Thank you.

Chaudhury: Yesterday, Barbara Walters kept asking, ‘Should we police the world? You know, are we doing this? Should America fix it?’ And, I think, you know, I’m from India, and we really respect, uh, the Obama administration, purely for changing the way people speak, for changing the discourse of the world, and for bringing the temperature down, you know. This is a womanly leadership.”

Jarrett: Thank you. I’m going to tell him you said that. I think he’ll be very pleased to hear that that’s how you describe it. And I think I’m going to use that in terms of taking the temperature down. Because it has to come down if you are actually going to listen to one another, you have to take a lot of the heat out of the discourse. I think he’s very good at doing that, thank you.

Prius driver's speeding out of control questioned by Feds.

I started doubting his story when he said his Prius was going more than 90 miles per hour on its own.

The driver, James Sikes, called 911 and told the operator his Prius had sped up to more than 90 miles per hour on its own, on Interstate 8 near San Diego. During and after the incident, 61-year-old Sikes told authorities he had used heavy pressure on his brake pedal at high speeds, the WSJ site said.

"But the investigation of the vehicle, carried out jointly by safety officials ... didn't find signs the brake had been applied at full force at high speeds over a sustained period of time," the Journal said, citing three people familiar with the investigation.

UK- Black fathers urged to be fathers to their kids.

Its not just a disturbing trend in America.

Black fathers need to become more involved with their children to help tackle social problems among young people, a government minister will say.

Prominent black MP David Lammy will tell the Runnymede race think tank that fathers must take more responsibility.

In a speech on Monday, he will say this would address issues such as education underachievement and high crime rates.

The higher education minister will also praise women in families where fathers are either absent or uninvolved.

In the event to link in with Mothering Sunday, he will say: "What many women want for Mothers' Day can't be given by their children - it is more engaged fathers."

'Emotional bond'

Mr Lammy will touch on figures that suggest 59% of black Caribbean and 44% of black African children grow up in single-parent families.

"The mark of a man is not how many children he spawns but how he matches up as a father," he will say.

The problem is in some areas that is the mark of a man including how much prison time.

If the minister can't point out the obvious to wayward men, learn from Don Vito Corleone.

Detroit city employees discouraged from wearing strong scents

What is going to happen is someone is going to complain about a scent and the person wearing it will counter-sue. I understand if you are one person with some sort of problem but that doesn't mean I think its going overboard not to wear something with a scent. How are you going to judge it if the complaint is reasonable?

City employees with a strong aroma of perfume, cologne or any scented products will soon be in for a warning.

Detroit officials have plans to place placards in three city buildings detailing scented products to avoid due to a settlement in a widely publicized federal lawsuit filed by a city planner in 2008 and settled last month.

The employee, Susan McBride, was awarded $100,000 in the federal case because of her breathing sensitivity to chemical products -- but she has yet to receive her money.


McBride, who filed her lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, complained that a co-worker's perfume made it challenging for her to breathe and do her job. The city initially fought it on the grounds that there was no medical diagnosis of her condition and that she is not disabled.

"It's unique. I think it should be used as a model for other people who are having similar problems," said Ann Curry Thompson, McBride's attorney.

The placards will be placed in the Cadillac Square Building, Coleman A. Young Municipal Center and First National Building. They ask employees to refrain from "wearing scented products, including ... colognes, aftershave lotions, perfumes, deodorants, body/face lotions ... (and) the use of scented candles, perfume samples from magazines, spray or solid air fresheners ..."

America and UK closer to losing AAA credit rating.

Thanks Obama.

-- The U.S. and the U.K. have moved “substantially” closer to losing their AAA credit ratings as the cost of servicing their debt rose, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

The governments of the two economies must balance bringing down their debt burdens without damaging growth by removing fiscal stimulus too quickly, Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of sovereign risk at Moody’s in London, said in a telephone interview.

Under the ratings company’s baseline scenario the U.S. will spend more on debt service as a percentage of revenue this year than any other top-rated country except the U.K., and will be the biggest spender from 2011 to 2013, Moody’s said today in a report.

“We expect the situation to further deteriorate in terms of the key ratings metrics before they start stabilizing,” Cailleteau said. “This story is not going to stop at the end of the year. There is inertia in the deterioration of credit metrics.”

ADL's Abe Foxman is shocked at Obama's dressing down Israel.

Anyone who has followed Foxman's career at the ADL as its director realizes that this is a Renault moment for him.

Jewish-American groups that support Israel are also joining the war of words.

"We are shocked and stunned at the Administration's tone and public dressing down of Israel," Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman said in a statement. "We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States."

Jews who support Israel and inexplicably Obama should be shocked because your ignorance of the Dem party cutting down of Israel in the last decade has it moves more to the left has been building to this moment.

Perhaps this will move Foxman to actually open his eyes beyond the evil of Evan. Christians and more to the bigger threat of Israel's enemies including Islamic terrorists that are surrounding them in the Middle East and here at home among the party he personally supports.

Obama admin whines Israel's new plans are an insult and affront.

It looks like someone is astonished that someone else is not impressed with hope and change.

The White House is raising the stakes with Israel, calling it an "insult" and an "affront" that the Jewish nation would continue plans to build 1,600 new apartments during a construction freeze aimed at re-igniting peace talks with Palestinians.

Palestinians have not sought as part of their capital the area of northeast Jerusalem where the Jewish settlement of Ramat Shlomo resides, but the decision to announce construction plans just as Vice President Joe Biden was visiting the region led to strained meetings that continues past his return.

Biden expressed his displeasure by showing up late to a dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to issue a statement of condemnation.

Matt Damon's Green Zone bombs, Universal puzzled

You can make an Iraq war movie but when you come in with an obvious liberal agenda then you are going to waste $100 million.

If Matt Damon can't sell an Iraq war film, perhaps this is a lost cause for Hollywood.

One week after the tiny war drama The Hurt Locker claimed the best-picture Oscar, Damon and Paul Greengrass— who directed the last two Bourne films — were expected to bring the Iraq war feature into the mainstream.

Instead, Green Zone put up little resistance to the competition this week, mustering just $14.5 million, according to studio estimates from Hollywood.com.

The debut was $4 million less than the modest expectations for the $100 million film, which was second to the 3-D fairy tale Alice inWonderland, which did $62 million in its second weekend. After 10 days, Wonderland has made $208 million.

While no one expected Zone to challenge Wonderland, even Universal Pictures, which distributed the film, expected it to debut in the high teens.

"We're disappointed," says Nikki Rocco, Universal's head of distribution. "And to tell you the truth, I'm puzzled. You've got the same great director and actor, in same style of film they did in the Bourne movies, just in a different place."

Goodwin Liu, Obama's radical nominee for the 9th Circuit bench

Elections has consequences and Obama is looking to stack the courts with very liberal nominees who are extremely hostile to the Constitution and think the bench is to used to lord over the public.

Liu has also aligned himself with progressive legal groups, including the American Constitution Society, where he is chairman of the board of directors. That's prompting opponents to argue that Liu is "too far outside the mainstream" to take a seat on a court just one step below the Supreme Court of the United States.

"He believes the Constitution is something judges can manipulate to have it say what they think culture or evolving standards of decency requires of it in a given day," said the Senate Judiciary Committee's top Republican Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

Ed Whelan, a one-time clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, echoed those concerns.

"Liu believes that judges have the authority to impose their views ... using clever verbal camouflage to disguise what they're doing."

Liu opponents point to a number of his writings, including a book he co-authored in 2009 called "Keeping Faith with the Constitution," in which the authors opine about their concept of judicial interpretation.

"Applications of constitutional text and principles must be open to adaptation and change ... as the conditions and norms of our society become ever more distant from those of the Founding generation."

That theme -- that the Constitution's text and principles must be adapted to changes in the world -- repeats throughout the book and raises eyebrows among conservatives.

What kind of changes does Mr. Liu believe the American public should follow?

Liu defined "welfare rights" as right to "education, shelter, subsistence, health care and the like, or to the money those things cost." In the article cited by the Times, Liu wrote: "I use the term 'welfare right' to mean an affirmative constitutional right to particular social goods such as 'education, shelter, subsistence, health care and the like, or to the money these things cost.' "

More excerpts here. That is the type of nominee that Obama loves, one who pushes "social justice" on the wallets of the public.

Birth Tourism to America on the rise for Turkish Parents.

Birth Tourism is popular among the elites from various countries like South Korea and cheap enough for those closer to America such as Venezuela. Now Turkish parents are getting in on the act.

Its clearly an abuse of the 14th amendment which was written to grant descedents of slaves citizenship and now is used for anyone who can walk or fly across the borders.

According to tourism expert Gürkan Boztepe and media sources, 12,000 Turkish children have been born in the U.S. since 2003.The numbers are significant enough to draw the attention of tourism companies and inspire them to pursue “birth tourism.”

“We found a company on the Internet and decided to go to Austin for our child’s birth,” said Selin Burcuoğlu who gave birth to a daughter last year. “It was incredibly professional. They organized everything for me. I had no problem adjusting and I had an excellent birth,” she told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

Burcuoğlu said she and her partner chose to have the birth in the U.S. to make their child’s life more comfortable. “I don’t want her to deal with visa issues – American citizenship has so many advantages.”

....Birth tourism to the U.S. is not just popular in Turkey but also in Asian countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. According to a Los Angeles Times report, many South Korean parents-to-be have chosen to give birth in the U.S. for many reasons, ranging from a desire to enroll their children in American schools to enabling them to avoid South Korean military service.

The birthright citizenship formerly applied to other countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia but both countries modified their law in the mid-1980s.

India maintained such birthright law until 2004, but ended the right to prevent continued illegal immigration from neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh

23% of welfare payments go to illegals in Los Angeles County.

Automatic citizenship by birth is a huge incentive to come here illegally, too bad an Ireland like vote to stop that is out of the question.

Nearly one-quarter of state welfare payments and food stamps issued in Los Angeles County go to children whose parents are in the U.S. illegally, according to January figures released today.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich offered the statistics, generated by the county's Department of Public Social Services, to help make the case for enforcing the nation's borders, establishing health care clinics on the border with Mexico and reimbursing local governments for unfunded state and federal mandates, according to his press deputy, Tony Bell.

The numbers show that more than $50 million in CalWORKS benefits and food stamps for January went to children born in the United States whose parents are in the country without documentation. This represents approximately 23 percent of the total benefits under the state welfare and food stamp programs, Antonovich said.

"When you add this to $350 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for health care, the total cost for illegal immigrants to county taxpayers far exceeds $1 billion a year -- not including the millions of dollars for education," Antonovich said.

"Obama seems not to respect his fellow citizens "

Via Instapundit.

OBAMA REINVENTION EFFORTS FACE A PROBLEM: “Something more fundamental is going on here: Obama seems not to respect his fellow citizens — the uninformed rubes who crashed the health-care town halls — nor care what they think. All his energy now is devoted to disregarding their strong aversion to his idea of health-care reform and forcing through a vote on something the public doesn’t want. It’s hard to bond with the American people, which is what Myers is suggesting, when your agenda conveys disdain for their concerns.”

Remember

“There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of todays liberalism. The American people are such dopes they can’t be counted upon to buy their own insurance.” – George Will.

I always felt that Obama has contempt for the public who don't care for his ideas. He feels he is the smartest man in the room and everyone else just shut up and follow behind him.

Tom Joyner whines about Tavis Smiley/ Al Sharpton feud.

Even I am sick of this nonsense now. Tavis Smiley is a pub hound and he got what he wanted from coming on the Tom Joyner Show calling out other black "leaders." Tom wants Tavis to understand if he wants Black America back on his side he has to kiss Obama's ass.

I hope that somehow, someway, Tavis will realize that if he is ever to gain the love and respect he once received from black America, he will have to find it in his heart to show love and respect for the president. It’s just that simple. And there’s a big difference in saying you have love and showing it.
Love is unconditional - or it should be anyway. That’s why I can be upset and disappointed with Tavis and some of the decisions he’s made over the last few years, but still love and respect him enough not to turn my back on him.


When I hear and read about the hate people have for Tavis right now, it makes me sad. Because I know that if Tavis knew how to get out of this situation, he would. But it’s not in him to do what needs to be done, to recognize he has gone down a wrong path, and his only real option is to turn around.


I believe the beef Tavis has with President Obama is personal, and only the two of them know what it’s really about. For all I know, it could stem from a pick up game of basketball where the president didn’t choose Tavis to be on his team. Whatever the problem is, I can’t change it. And you can’t either.


So, I make my appeal to you, black America: Don’t use your energy to spew hate against a brother that you know deep inside is in a bad situation. Use your energy to help black leaders - including the president - find solutions to some of the issues that are plaguing our community. Use your energy .....

Let me give Tom and anyone else the answers to this little feud.

1) Smiley is still pissed off that Obama did not go to his State of Black Union event when he was running for President, Smiley called him out and everyone turned on him because they realized he is an egomaniac.

2) Smiley's whining that Obama is not looking out for black people is racist. Obama is the President of the United States of America, not just black people. He can't even if he wanted to purposely target blacks with Federal money for specific reasons because it most likley unconstitutional and politics wise he would be slammed by everyone else as being a racist. I am still waiting for the outrage about the huge increase in federal funding to HBCUs because that is clearly targeting via race.

3) Joyner being one of the most prominent suck ups to Obama is wrong that Tavis has to come around and kiss Obama's ass to be loved again. If disagreeing with Obama is going to cause you scorn in the whatever black America Joyner claims he is speaking for now, that says a lot about the community than the person raising objections.

Its fine to pound Tavis for his views but if you are pounding Tavis mainly because he hasn't kissed up to Obama then that is just stupid tribalism politics at it worst.

This feud was fun when it started but it quickly dropped into egoland and it hasn't gotten boring. Talk and make up or shut the hell up.

Illegal immigrants, backers to rally in Washington

As I said, I am amazed. The fact they choose to come here and now demanding America changes the laws to suit their needs is a slap in the face of American law and those who came here properly.

Immigration activists plan to bring tens of thousands of supporters and undocumented immigrants to the nation's capital rally as a way to intensify pressure on the White House to act quickly on immigration reform.

``Florida's participation in the Washington event is remarkable,'' said Ali Noorani, executive director of Washington-based National Immigration Forum, one of the groups involved in organizing the rally.

Noorani said Florida organizers were planning to send 40 busloads to Washington, including about half a dozen from South Florida.

Moreno and the others are hopeful but skeptical of seeing legislation become law.

They desperately want immigration reform so they can stop being fearful of being deported, but are also tired of government promises.

Former President George W. Bush tried -- and failed -- several times to convince Congress to pass an immigration bill, while Obama last year put immigration reform on the back burner to advance healthcare reform.

``We have been fighting for immigration reform for years and nothing has happened,'' said Sebastián Sebastián, a 29-year-old Guatemalan artist in Homestead who will travel to Washington on one of the buses. ``It's time the government fulfills its promises.''